Scientists proves once and for all that porn makes you a little brain-dead

Well, hasn't science been informative today. Earlier, we learned that women who see pictures of sex are more likely to actually want sex. Imagine that. Sounds similar to a thing I've heard of known as pornography. Well, luckily for us, science has been studying that too. And what has science found? Watching porn literally shuts down a part of your brain.

Seems obvious enough, if you've ever seen a guy's face while he's watching it. Still, it's surprising since you'd imagine porn would be lighting up most regions of the brain like whoa. Not exactly, according to the new study out of the Netherlands. An article in Live Science explains:

"Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal."

I wonder where all that surplus blood could be going. So what does your brain on porn look like?

"The scan results revealed that the high-intensity erotic video — and only the high-intensity erotic video — resulted in far less blood being sent to the primary visual cortex. The region is still active, just much less so. Usually, that effect is only seen when people are asked to conduct a nonvisual task, like remembering words, while also watching some sort of visual stimuli."

With all the gender-segregated studies about sex lately, kudos to this one for studying both male and female responses to porn. But don't think that means they used the same videos. Heavens no! Here's what they showed women:

"One of the videos used in the study was a simple nature documentary about marine life in the Caribbean. The other two were selections from 'women-friendly' pornographic movies, one depicting only foreplay and manual stimulation and the other depicting oral sex and vaginal intercourse. Earlier studies had shown that the higher-intensity video showing intercourse produced stronger physical arousal in women than the foreplay-focused movie clip."

You don't say. And here I thought we just want to be kissed and gently held till dawn, preferably on a beach.